Reducing staff salaries - how to have team convo?

1

My org is tight on cashflow and is preparing for a future scenario where fundraising doesn’t go as well as we hope. The director and I both think that our salaries and benefits are very generous and would like to have a collaborative (and hopefully not-too-stressful) convo about the options of reducing salaries across the board and voluntarily reducing one’s hours. Anyone have advice on how to approach a convo like this? How to ensure that staff don’t feel pressured to answer in a certain way out of fear? And also how to be sensitive to people raised working class or are currently tight on cash? Thnx

2

my experiences of having to be part of leading conversations like this in the past have usually involved/considered:

  • telling everyone at once (as far as possible) to minimise risk of contradictory information starting to circulate;

  • being open with the financial accounts and information: showing how different scenarios might play out (and when the whole organisation goes bankrupt in each);

  • having external and credible benchmarks for salaries and benefits elsewhere to help support the arguments that these are already very generous;

  • presenting the wider current financial context of the sector you’re part of (i.e. across the whole social economy, only 10% of all grant applications are being awarded, the typical grant amount is for less than £10,000, and the major grant making bodies are giving out less money then they did in previous years);

  • signposting to additional / supplementary / alternative sources of support (about 1/3 of all people in receipt of universal credit are also in some form of paid employment).

Education and perspective can help us make more informed sense of changing circumstances, especially when we feel we have little control or voice in them.

Hope there may be something of encouragement in the above.

3

thanks so much! very helpful.